


Wendigo

by theneonpineapple



Series: #JessLivesAU [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death Fix, Episode: s01e02 Wendigo, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, I'm In Your Canon Defrosting Your Ladies, Jessica Moore Lives, POV Alternating, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 15:24:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17686055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theneonpineapple/pseuds/theneonpineapple
Summary: Unable to find any trace of Brady or the demon that tried to kill Jess, Sam, Jess, and Dean go to Blackwater Ridge, where the family of a hiker insist he's gone missing.





	Wendigo

**Author's Note:**

> ask and ye shall receive, i got distracted and was later than an hour so the person who requested more of this fic ASAP can keep their soul... for now

Dean glanced at Jess in the rearview mirror. She was carefully separating tags from new clothes - collecting even the tiny plastic bits on the backs, which wasn’t even a thing people did, and dropping them into an empty foam cup from lunch. Because Dean had, at least, impressed upon her the necessity of keeping Baby clean.

She had earbuds in and occasionally hummed a few bars of whatever it was she was listening to. But mostly she just separated out the clothes they’d picked up for her, and folded them neatly into the brand new duffel bag.

Overall, she seemed… normal. Exceedingly normal.

It grated on Dean. Not just because she and Sam seemed to work so well together, for all that she was some girl next door, but because no one should be that normal in the face of almost being murdered by a demon.

But she hadn’t flinched when she swallowed the holy water he’d slipped her earlier, or when he’d touched her arm with his silver ring. And if she wasn’t some kind of supernatural sleeper agent, he didn’t know what the hell was wrong with her. What kind of civilian not only accepted what they did for a living but, when faced with an actual damn demon, seemed less traumatized than Sam had at the thought of losing her? And to just up and come with them? When she had to quit her job to do it?

Something about this was fishy as hell.

* * *

They knocked on the door of the Haley chick to ask more questions about the missing brother. Sam was apparently still fuming over Dean checking to see if this was a case instead of just rushing off into the woods to look for Dad.

Dean wondered how long this weird, shoot-first-ask-questions-never Sam would stick around. He wasn’t cut out to be the sensible, cautious sibling.

And Jess, meanwhile, had finally started to crack. Every since they’d talked to Ranger Wilkinson about the missing guy, she’d been getting twitchier and twitchier. The constant metallic clink of her necklace as she fidgeted nervously was driving him up the wall.

He couldn’t wait to get into the woods and leave her at the motel.

The door opened. And, okay, Haley Collins was hot.

“You must be Haley Collins. I'm Dean, this is Sam, and Jess - we're, ah, we're rangers with the Park Service. Ranger Wilkinson sent us over. He wanted us to ask a few questions about your brother Tommy.”

“It takes three rangers to ask questions?” Haley asked.

Dean turned to glare at Sam, because it was his damn girlfriend throwing things off. Jess shoved her hands in her pockets. “I’m not a ranger,” she said. “I’m a paramedic. Off-duty. And the truth is, Wilkinson doesn’t know we’re here. If he did, we’d probably get fired.”

“Then why are you here?” Haley asked.

“Because you went to Wilkinson even though you knew your brother wasn’t supposed to be back yet. Which means you must be pretty sure something’s wrong. I want to know what that something is.”

Dean stared at Jess.

Sam, who had no room to act like this whole mess wasn’t at least partially his fault, stared at her too.

“Come on in,” Haley said, and stepped aside to hold open the door.

Dean leaned in close as he followed Sam and Jess into the house. “You wanna let me do the talking now?”

“Go ahead,” Jess said.

“So, if Tommy's not due back for a while, how do you know something's wrong?” Sam asked.

Haley set a bowl of food down on the table in front of a teenage boy. Dean noted that, despite being a teenage boy, the kid didn’t reach for the food immediately, but instead kept his head down.

“He checks in every day by cell. He emails, photos, stupid little videos—we haven't heard anything in over three days now,” she said.

Clink, went the dog tags Jess wore.

Sam barely even pretended he was paying attention to Haley when he said, “Well… maybe he can't get cell reception?”

He was staring at Jess, so Dean kept his eyes on Haley instead. Someone had to do the damn job.

“He's got a satellite phone, too,” said Haley.

“Could it be he's just having fun and forgot to check in?”

“He wouldn't do that,” the teenager said quickly. When Dean looked at him, he quickly looked back down at his keyboard again instead.

“Our parents are gone,” said Haley. “It's just my two brothers and me. We all keep pretty close tabs on each other.”

Dean glanced at Sam, who hadn’t spoken to him in over a year before all this. Three days of silence, and this chick was already pissing off rangers. Would anyone have even noticed if Dean had disappeared? Dad only called him every couple of weeks. Bobby mostly waited for Dean to call him. Sam hadn’t called him in nearly three years, hadn’t seemed thrilled when Dean had called him last.

“Can I see the pictures he sent you?” Sam asked.

Haley’s little brother pushed the laptop over to an empty spot at the table and withdrew, eyes flicking to Dean and Sam again cautiously.

Jess cleared her throat. “Mind showing me to a bathroom I can use?” She asked the kid.

* * *

“I didn’t catch your name,” Jess said.

He looked up at her. “Ben,” he mumbled.

“I’m Jess. You’re, what, 19?” She high-balled it, because when you’re young, people assuming you’re older is a high compliment.

“Seventeen,” he said.

“I was eighteen,” she said. “Just by a couple of months. The last time I saw him, he’d gotten leave for Christmas, and we celebrated my birthday a month early. It was April when they declared him missing, and—I know what you’re going through.”

“Did they find him?”

She hesitated a second too long.

Ben’s face shuttered.

“We’re going out to Blackwater Ridge ourselves,” she said. “If he’s out there, we’ll find him.”

She wasn’t sure how she’d convince Dean of the necessity of finding Tommy Collins, dead or alive or anything in between, but she had to. She couldn’t help Brady now, hadn’t been able to save the one person who’d mattered most to her back then, but she’d be damned if she’d ignore people she could help.

Ben bit his lip and nodded a little. Then, “The bathroom’s this door here.”

“Oh!” She said. “Uh, I don’t actually need it. You just looked uncomfortable in there.”

He scratched the back of his head, reminding her so much of Sam that she smiled. “Uh. I wasn’t - I’m not a big fan of strangers.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll clear out once Sam gets the last video your brother sent,” she assured him. “We’ve got an early morning tomorrow.”

“We’ll see you there,” he said.

Jess blinked. “You’re going out to Blackwater Ridge too?”

“Haley hired a guide. We’re gonna find him.”

She wanted to tell him to stay home. She did. But. “If I could’ve gotten to where my brother was last seen,” she said, “I would’ve gone, too, no matter how dangerous it was. You’ll be careful? Pack bear spray?”

Ben huffed a little bit at that. “Haley’s going to fuss over me enough, I don’t need a ranger doing it too.”

“Paramedic, actually. They teach you fussing in nursing school, and I was an A student.”

He cracked a grin.

“All right, Ben,” she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

* * *

Much as she was some sort of goody-two-shoes, Jess at least seemed comfortable enough in a bar, ordering a beer with them and, strangely, doing the same survey of the bar that Dean was. She obviously wasn't cruising for pickups, and her eyes lingered on the exits.

Dean frowned. Resolved to test her with silver and holy water again.

Sam was oblivious. "So, Blackwater Ridge doesn't get a lot of traffic. Local campers, mostly. But still, this past April, two hikers went missing out there. They were never found."

"Any before that?" Dean asked.

Sam pulled article clippings out of Dad's journal. Lost Creek Gazette, apparently. He skimmed them quickly. Eight hikers vanished, authorities baffled, grizzlies blamed.

"Yeah, in 1982, eight different people all vanished in the same year. Authorities said it was a grizzly attack," Sam continued, unnecessarily, but Jess—

"Are you writing this down?" Dean asked in disbelief, as she jotted down notes.

She stared at him. "You don't keep any records?"

"No, I use something called a memory," he said.

"Hey," Sam snapped at him, even though Jess just arched her eyebrows back at him, unflustered.

She kept writing when Sam continued, "And again in 1959 and again before that in 1936."

"Every twenty-three years," she said.

"Like clockwork," Sam agreed.

"Kinda rules out serial killers and bears. Can I see?" She leaned past Sam to read over his shoulder. Aloud she read, "Only six in '59, and five in '36. If that keeps up, I'd expect somewhere between 10 and 13 killed this year."

"What?" Dean asked, turning to stare at her.

"I used something called projected increase," she said, scrawling a row of numbers out in the margins of her notebook.

"Oh, god, math? Sammy, your girl some kind of math geek?"

Jess looked up. Raised her eyebrows in challenge again. "Hey, juvie, you got your skills, I got mine."

"Stop bonding," said Sam, "it's creeping me out. Look at this," he turned the laptop around. "Watch this. Here's a clincher. I downloaded that guy Tommy's video to the laptop. Check this out."

Sam clicked through a few frames of the video.

"Do it again," Dean said.

Sam repeated the frames, making his you-seeing-what-I'm-seeing face over the top of the laptop.

"That's three frames. That's a fraction of a second. Whatever that thing is, it can move."

Dean smacked Sam’s shoulder. “Told you something weird was going on.”

“Actually, I don't know how fast bears can run, but a human at top speeds can do something like twenty feet a second," Jess said.

“Dude,” said Dean. “You just said it wasn’t a person ‘cause the years were too far apart.”

“Could be a series of bears, coincidentally striking on a pattern of years, with increased kills from habitat reduction. Could be your father in that clip, fighting whatever’s killing people, if it’s not a bear.”

“I have something that’ll probably be a deciding factor,” said Sam. He held up one last clipping. “In '59 one camper survived this supposed grizzly attack. Just a kid. Barely crawled out of the woods alive.”

“Is there a name?” Dean asked.

At the same time, Jess said, "He still live around here?"


End file.
